Case Studies

Trams and QsmartStorage have deployed leading edge technology solutions to some of the UK's biggest and most respected broadcasters, production houses and businesses. Our solutions provide a complete system designed to integrate seamlessly into existing IT infrastructures.

“It’s great working with Trams as they really know what they are talking about. They appreciate where we’re coming from and what we’re trying to achieve, and they are super-fast at responding.”

MUTV

Man Utd needed to go from SD to HD for their TV Channel along with a backup archiving solution that was expandable, dependable, and future proof. It was decided the best way forward would be to move the whole facility from Old Trafford to a designated Media building just down the road.

The new facility has updated all 22 of its edit stations with HP Z820/420 series workstations, installing 8GB fibre cards into each unit, along with a 8GB fabric network backbone, thus enabling MUTV to Edit and playback in HD using Kona cards.

They are all then connecting to the new SAN which consists of a M441 and then re-purposing their existing Active storage disks, Off the back off this we then have a stornext enabled AEL 500 tape drive, Trams Jonathan Wilding have been a integral part of the planning and system architecture on this project, also with ourselves being lead engineer doing the full install for MUTV to a agreed budget and timeline.

MUTV have recently added a further 120TB of storage to their estate, replacing the Active Storage Disks, This was all supplied by and installed by Trams – References available on request

Vubiquity

Vubiquity is a linear and VOD content distribution, monetization and analytics company operating within the US, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America across TV, PC, mobile and tablet devices.

Trams has recently supplied Vubiquity with StorNext Lattus object storage and is at present actively engaged with Vubiquity on a number of key projects. These projects include the re-design of their content workflow to maximise performance, a revolutionary new transcode platform which will massively increase Vubiquity's capacity to transcode in faster than real time and a project to upgrade their tape archive capacity to LTO7, significantly increasing performance, capacity and recoverability.

Trams’ many years of experience with both the StorNext Filesystem and StorNext Storage Manager made Trams an obvious candidate for Vubiquity to help and support their growth. It is planned that Trams' system design in London will form a template for Vubiquity business outlets worldwide.

Global Fashion Brand

Trams was approached by a leading global fashion brand who were facing some significant challenges with their data. This brand’s in-house teams create and manage all content, including marketing, packaging design, fashion video and advertising and have over 750TB of data which is growing at an exponential rate.

Trams worked with the company and has gathered all of this data into a number of filesystems managed by Quantum StorNext appliances. The systems support over 30 mixed Mac and PC Video editors directly attached to the system by Fibre Channel whilst also supporting around 150 creatives via lower bandwidth network access. System performance and stability have improved dramatically and staff can even work in uncompressed 4K direct from the StorNext platform without dropping frames.

Not only is there a tangible ROI, but in addition the system’s DR capability and back-up options are dramatically increased.

BBC Sport

Tiered storage gives broadcaster easy access to full content archive

BBC Sport calls its rich library of sports content, dating back more than 75 years, its “production archive”, because it needs to be available to all its staff for use at a moment’s notice. It is a vital part of everyday production and critical to leveraging their history and brand.

When BBC Sport decided to move to a new digital-based archive in 2014, a competitive tendering process followed, which was won by Quantum partner Trams in collaboration with Media Manor, a specialist in broadcast and production workflows.

In addition to a winning price-performance combination, the solution blended production and archive storage.

“They had set some target performance metrics, and we comfortably met them,” says Warren Peel, Managing Director of Trams. “Our proposed architecture dug deep into their workflow requirements so that we could meet their real needs as a true production library, not a simple archive.”

BBC Northern Ireland

Switching to an all-digital capture system presented workflow challenges for Northern Ireland’s public broadcasting system (BBC NI). In response, the company, which had leveraged the Quantum StorNext scale-out storage solution for more than a decade to manage its ever-growing media asset library, expanded its StorNext environment. The results were higher-speed ingest and transcoding, faster production, and a dual-site, fully redundant workflow environment

“The new system has much faster performance overall, and it provides much more flexibility. Now, we have 200 seats with high-performance access to all the shared content through the StorNext File System—so that more editors can work faster and more collaboratively, and spend less time moving themselves or the content around”
Roland Rodgers
Technology development and infrastructure specialist, BBC NI

Gramercy Park Studios

A case study on Gramercy Park Studios appear in Televisual Magazine recently. Below is an excerpt from the publication article.

Gramercy Park Studios (GPS) is a different kind of post production house. They are a creative boutique facility, and one of the only to offer audio and visual post within a single collaborative space. Their disciplines include Editing, Colour Grading, Motion Graphics / Design, Finishing and Sound all run by a group of talented and experienced individuals working as a team under the same roof.

When the decision was made to their new high-end post house in the heart of Soho Gramercy Park Studios turned to Trams.

“We have a longstanding relationship with Trams. They’ve always given us the best deals and the best service. If we say, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to build, these are the rooms we need and this is the equipment we have to have’ they understand the configurations and there’s no time wasted. They are professionals in the area of creative workstations and the creative desktop and the applications that go along with that. They’ve got an extremely good supply chain so we get equipment straight away. And their service and backup is extremely good.”
Mark Keller, Group CTO, Hogarth/Gramercy Park Studios

At the centre of GPS’s technical infrastructure sits a number of Quantum products. Trams worked with GPS to facilitate the specification and installation of the Quantum kit at the facility. “Trams put us in touch directly with Quantum – they had really good contacts at Quantum so we spent time talking directly with Quantum about what we wanted to do and what we wanted to achieve with our storage. They were really fruitful meetings,” says Alex Buchanan, Technical Operations Director, Hogarth/GPS. Quantum was already a tried and tested brand for GPS, with Hogarth having relatively recently successfully completed a move over to Quantum kit:

“We have Quantum elsewhere – in our head office in Shaftsbury Avenue we replaced our Xsan just over a year ago with Quantum M330. When the renewal came up for the support, a year after the installation, we realised we hadn’t switched it off in that time and it had caused us absolutely no bother whatsoever,” says Buchanan. “So really going for Quantum here wasn’t really a choice between it and something else; we knew we were going to do it anyway. It was really just a case of spec’ing out the disk. The nice thing about Quantum is we’re familiar with it and it’s just a much more robust enterprise product than Xsan was. So migrating to it was really an easy decision for us.”

Hogarth

Hogarth Worldwide Relies on StorNext to Keep Up with Rapid Business Expansion

Hogarth Worldwide—a fast-growing global marketing implementation agency—needed a storage solution that could provide high-performance, collaborative workflow across multiple sites and platforms, and easily scale to support future needs. Since 2009, StorNext has been the answer—delivering flexibility, performance, and scale. And it gives Hogarth teams the ability to collaborate on projects no matter what platform they are using—Mac, Linux, or Windows.

We are a real workflow company—and StorNext provides the most flexible, powerful end-to-end workflow system available anywhere. There is no way we could have done what we have without it.
Nick Wood, Production systems manager, Hogarth

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